Wraith (6 page)

Zane already knew my secret; but still, talking
about it in real time made me uncomfortable. I didn’t share this kind of crap
with anybody. It didn’t feel right. I might as well have been standing there in
my underwear.

"Come on, Kali," Zane cajoled, looking
somewhat disbelieving. "Don’t go all defensive on me, now! You can’t
seriously believe I’m going to think
you’re
weird?"

He shook his head at me and laughed out loud. After
a long, thoughtful moment, I laughed with him. "Sorry. It’s just that… I
don’t talk about it. I did once, and everybody thought I was psychotic, or
schizophrenic, or something even worse. So now I pretend."

His expression turned serious. "How long ago
was that?"

"When I was five."

His eyes widened. "You live with this… seeing
these shadows… every day, and you haven’t talked to anyone about it since you
were five?"

I shrugged. "You get used to it."

He continued to watch me thoughtfully, his gaze
drifting back and forth between me and the shadow of the pregnant Polynesian
woman, which to him was an empty stretch of beach. "Tell me about
it," he said quietly, his voice dropping to the same dreaded, husky
whisper he had manipulated me with so successfully yesterday. "Tell me
what you see."

My jaw clenched. I knew there was no real risk in
being honest with him. He was not going to assume I needed psych meds; and even
if he did, he couldn’t tell anyone. Still, sharing the shadows seemed so…
personal.

"Please, Kali?"

Crap.

Sooner or later, that sexy whisper was going to be
the death of me.

"It’s a woman, okay?" I said before I
could think anymore. "She’s very faint. Centuries old, probably. I was
watching her yesterday, and I really wanted to see her again…"

I spilled the whole works. Describing the woman in
detail, answering every one of Zane’s fascinated questions. But as the expected
point in the drama neared, I found myself impatient with the inquisition,
turning my attention instead to the spot up the beach where the other shadow
would soon appear.

"What’s up there?" Zane insisted,
following my gaze.

The second wispy form appeared, walking slowly
across invisible sand drifts that bore no relation to the ones present now. I
smiled. "The man she
thinks
is out there," I answered, tossing
my head toward the water.

The man’s steps quickened, though his legs were
obviously weak, and his lips moved as he called out to the woman. I could
barely hear him… just the faintest quiver of bass vibration floating above the
breeze. He was speaking in another language, so I couldn’t have understood him
anyway, but his intent was clear. He was shouting to get her attention.

She turned. I moved a few steps closer, not wanting
to miss her expression.

"What’s happening?" Zane demanded.

"She sees him," I whispered breathlessly.
I couldn’t begin to describe the look of pure, emphatic joy that transformed
her features instantly from the depths of sorrow to the height of ecstasy—the
whipping flame of energy that sent her pregnant, unwieldy body into flight. I
had never seen any woman
that
pregnant run
that
fast. Barefoot on
the sand, her shawl discarded, she sprinted like an extra wide gazelle, breasts
and belly bobbing, covering the distance between them in seconds.

I ran along beside her, heedless of how ridiculous I
looked, to catch the reunion up close. I was not disappointed.

She threw herself into the man’s arms as if
compelled there by a suction as powerful as the sea itself, and he held onto
her awkward form as if a force just as great threatened to snatch her. They
wanted, needed, to touch each other—every inch of skin not in contact seemed
unbearable. They did not kiss in the traditional sense, but rubbed their faces
together, cheek to cheek, lip to lip, as if trying to absorb one other, to
assimilate their two forms into one delirious, satisfied whole.

The man’s face was so faint it was difficult to see
much detail, but I was certain—whether I could see it or not—that his eyes were
tearing. He was no taller than me, with long black hair in a ponytail and no
clothes to speak of other than a loin cloth; but for her, he was the perfect fit. 
I stood there, mesmerized, drinking in the heady joy and warmth that,
unaccountably, still radiated from their wispy outlines hundreds of years after
the fact—until once again they disappeared together, slowly and gradually, into
nothingness.

"You know," Zane prodded good-naturedly,
"it’s really rude not to narrate for the blind."

I forced my mind back to the present. "Sorry.
Just got carried away. I love that scene."

I sighed.

Despite his professed interest, I figured Zane was
only humoring me. But I soon learned that once onto something that intrigued
him, the guy was a pit bull. He badgered me mercilessly until I had related
every detail of what I had just witnessed, and then some.

"Do you ever research the things you see?"
he asked. "Go online, or into a history book, and try to match up the
characters and time frame?"

My eyebrows lifted. "Are you kidding? Why would
I want to do that? I told you—I try my best to ignore them. It’s healthier that
way. I only pay attention to the happy ones, because they make me happy. But it
doesn’t do them any good."

His brow furrowed. "But you could be seeing
something important. Something that history has wrong, even."

"What if I am?" I replied defensively.
"There’s nothing I can do about it. Nobody would believe me. I’d just wind
up in a psych ward. Think about it!"

"I suppose," he conceded. "But still…
to have that ability…"

My teeth clenched. I knew he wasn’t trying to be
critical, but I had worked hard, all my life, to stay sane in my own skin—I did
not need the one person to whom I had finally confessed my secret telling me I
was handling it wrong.

"We're supposed to be talking about you, not
me," I said firmly, setting off down the beach again. "Now, tell me
more about your mother."

Zane's face lit up again, just as a wide band of
transparency settled into the middle of his forehead. "Well, like I said,
she was a professional actress," he began, his voice proud. "I can
remember watching her in TV commercials. My favorite was one where she had to
swing a tennis racket. She wasn’t athletic at all, and she used to moan and
groan about how many takes it took to make her look like a pro. There was also
a dog food one I liked, where she worked with an Airedale in a cowboy outfit.
But her main thing was the soaps. She played one particular character a long
time—can’t remember the name. People would recognize her on the street and call
out to us. Sometimes they would look at me funny because her baby on the show
was a girl, and they didn’t understand that she wasn’t her character. But she
loved the attention."

His voice trailed off, and he was silent for a
moment. His expression had become troubled.

"What is it?" I asked. "You remember
something bad?"

He huffed out a breath. "Not yet. No. But I
have this feeling that something… happened to her. To both of us. I just can’t
remember what."

I swallowed. The darkness in his expression troubled
me. "Do you think she’s still alive?" I asked tentatively.

His eyes narrowed in concentration. "No,"
he said finally. "I don’t think she is."

We walked in silence a while longer, both of us
struggling, perhaps, to understand the bizarre dynamic he was operating in. If
his mother was alive, where was she? If he could find her again, would she be
able to see or hear him like I could? And an even grimmer thought: if she was
dead, why wasn’t she here, with him, now? 

He appeared not to want to discuss it. And I had no
idea what to say.

"Look over there," he said at last,
changing the subject. "This is 'Ehukai beach. And
that
is the
Banzai Pipeline."

I looked. We were not far from where I had laid out
my beach mat yesterday, but with Zane's guidance, I took in the vista with more
educated eyes. Giant waves rolled in off the ocean regularly here, just as they
did a little farther north on Sunset Beach. But the way they rolled in at this
particular spot was different. Wave after wave swelled, stood up vertically,
then began to peel over at the top—creating a colossal water tunnel that spread
sideways along the length of the wave for several seconds before, with the same
graceful sweeping motion, it collapsed in on itself in a violent froth of white
foam.

I had seen such water tunnels before, when a tall
wave spilled over just right; but at this spot it kept happening, over and over
again. Not only that, but these waves were so large that the tunnels they
created were tall enough for a person to stand up in. 

The surfers were doing just that. "Look!"
Zane said excitedly, pointing. "See that guy? That’s Ezekiel. He
rocks
."

I watched with mingled awe and horror as the surfer,
dwarfed in size by the massive swell coming on next, skated fearlessly over its
crest to dip down, turn, and slip inside the curl at just the right moment,
then zip along the tube’s length at a speed that kept him ahead of the massive
structure’s inevitable collapse. At one point I lost sight of him behind the
churning wall of white, but amazingly, he popped up again from its ruins—still
upright on his board, still moving, and still in control.

"Wow," was the only comment I could
muster.

"Pretty sweet, huh? Not just anyone can do
that, by the way. Only the best can handle the pipe on a day like this."

I believed him, as the next surfer I watched screwed
up his timing and got caught with the heavy wall of water crashing on top of him,
knocking him into the froth and sending his board flying high up into the air.
The surfer was fine, however—popping up within seconds to reclaim his board,
which had been stalled in its escape by some kind of leash.

"This looks really dangerous," I said
stupidly.

"Most deadly surf spot in the world," Zane
answered nonchalantly. "The waves may be high but the water underneath is
pretty shallow, and you can get banged up bad if you hit the reef or a lava
spire. Bust your head without a helmet, and you’re a goner." He took a
couple steps toward the water.

"So where’s your helmet?"

He looked over his shoulder and winked at me.
"Being dead does have its perks."

It did not occur to me to wonder, until I watched
him run full bore into the water—his lean legs moving through the swells
without causing so much as a ripple—exactly how a ghost could surf.

I found out. But I was glad the other surfers
didn’t, because if they realized that pretty much every time one of them caught
a wave, there was a teenage ghost surfer with no regard for personal space
totally hijacking their board, they might have been too freaked out for safety.

Watching Zane in action was hysterical. He simply
couldn’t get enough. He would start out with one surfer, ride through the tube,
disappear, and then reappear with another at the crest of the next wave. I had
to hand it to him—even with the ability to cheat all the laws of physics, what
he was doing couldn’t be easy. His position in space seemed to be affected by
nothing other than his mind, so staying on the board required—if not physical
prowess—no small amount of concentration and sheer athletic instinct. He could
sense where the board was going to go, how fast, and which way the surfer would
turn. He wasn’t perfect by any means—more than once I laughed out loud as the
board took a turn he missed, leaving him skating off into oblivion, suspended
by nothing, or in one case, absently flying off through the tunnel’s back wall.
But what sport it was, he clearly enjoyed, sharing as no other human could the
charge that each surfer felt during those exhilarating, solitary seconds when
they were totally encased within the aqua-white walls of water. 

"Did you see that one?" he asked
excitedly, appearing next to me quite suddenly after his co-rider had wiped out
in spectacular fashion, being kicked a good body’s length straight up in the
air, upside-down.

"Is he all right?"

"He’s fine. Came up laughing, actually. But
what a stupid move! I told him he shouldn’t take off there—it was never going
to work, he was too far inside."

"Let me guess. He didn’t take your
advice."

Zane’s eyes twinkled. "They never do.
Idiots."

I noticed that his curls were dripping.

"How do you
do
that?" I asked,
curiosity at last overwhelming me. "How do you look wet when the water
never touches you? And where do the different outfits come from?"

He smirked. "Mind over no matter. I look
however I want to look. Cool, huh? Check that out!" He pointed upwards in
the direction of a fluffy white cloud, but I saw nothing noteworthy.

"What?" I asked, looking back at him and
answering my own question. He was now dressed, head to toe, in a spotless Air
Force pilot’s uniform.

"Think Dad would approve?" he asked
smugly.

My eyes rolled. "That is
so
unfair. So I
suppose you’re really short and ugly, too?"

He smirked again. "Can’t change the basics.
Just the wrapper."

"Glad to hear it."

Whoops
. Too much?

He smiled, but didn’t comment. "So," he
said finally, having changed in a blink back into his wet suit. "Are you
sold? Are you going to sign up for that surfing lesson with your parents?"

I shuddered. "Hardly."

"Why not?"

"Because I can’t swim."

I said it casually enough, as I had trained myself
to do. People tended to make less of a big deal out of it then. It was better
to throw it out there when it didn’t matter than wait until it did.